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Last weekend i attended Wordcamp in Lillyfield Sydney.  I was stoked to attend an awesome conference for the wordpress blogging system as i have been using it increasingly for charity projects and my client work.  I’m a big advocate of blogging for building a profile online and promoting yourself or your company.

Now i’m not going to give you a report of every word spoken, i’m sure you can find that on some other sites.  And i’m not a super geek, even though i know my way around open source web development.

The Camp itself was held in the arty Red Box Theatre and it was a nerd fest, most of the crew had their mini laptops and frantically twittering as the event went on.

The presentations were generally great and informative.  Jane Shaw from the Atomic team gave a great presentation on the new features of the next version of wordpress whch included

• drag drop admin pannels
• smaller header
• focus on user experience
• a confirmed improved ease of use
• direct media uploads
• cookie based layout, meaning it will remember your preferences
• nested comments
• improved tag management
• direct install of plugins from the admin interface
• inprovements to tinyMCE editor
• Accessibility is fully supported
• Continued standards compliance

Another presentation i enjoyed was Matt Mullenweg co-founder of wordpress and owner of Automatic.  It was good to hear about some of the history and features of wordpress.    SOme of the key points

• blogs are particularly search friendly
• Pingomatic was created which pings 40 search engines and is included in wordpress
• all development at Automatic is released as GPL open source liscence, i thought this was great!
• there are now 125000 iPhone users of wordpress iphone app
• a keen advocate of open source saying “Once you get a taste of freedom, it is hard to go back”, good call Matt

These were some of the most interesting speakers, i have to say i lost interest in the discussion pannel who sounded like a bunch of politicians.    But overall a good inspiration and i’ll be making plenty more wordpress sites to come and plan to develop a few open source themes and plugins to help the community.  Thanks Wordcamp!

http://wordcamp.org.au/

pictures of wordcamp